A 1996 overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, from 1600 onwards.

Acknowledgements; List of contributors; 1. Introduction: new perspectives on women and gender in Russian literature Rosalind Marsh; Part I. Historical and Biographical Perspectives: 2. Women in seventeenth-century Russian literature Rosalind McKenzie; 3. Conflicts over gender and status in early nineteenth-century Russian literature: the case of Anna Bunina and her Padenie faetona Wendy Rosslyn; 4. Reading the future: women and fortune-telling in Russia (1770-1840) Faith Wigzell; 5. Russian women writers of the nineteenth century Ol'ga Demidova; 6. The 'woman question' of the 1860s, and the ambiguity of the 'learned woman' Arja Rosenholm; 7. Carving out a career: women prose writers, 1885-1920, the biographical background Charlotte Rosenthall; 8. The fate of women writers in literature at the beginning of the twentieth century: 'A. Mire', Anna Mar, Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal Mariia Mikhailova; 9. Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal's 'The singing ass': a woman's view of men and Eros Pamela Davidson; 10. Anastasiia Verbitskaia reconsidered Rosalind Marsh; 11. Soviet woman of the 1980s: self-portrait in poetry Elena Trofimova; Part II. The Perspective Of Literary Criticism: 12. The silence of rebellion: women in the work of Leonid Andreev Eva Buchwald; 13. Poor Liza: the sexual politics of Elizaveta Bam Daniil Kharms Graham Roberts; 14. The crafting of a self: Lidiia Ginzburg's early journal Jane Gary Harris; 15. Voyeurism and ventriloquism: Anatolii Velichanskii's Podzemnaia nimfa Gerald S. Smith; 16 Thinking (self) in the poetry of Ol'ga Sedakova Stephanie Sandler; 17. Women's space and women's place in contemporary Russian fiction Helena Goscilo; Index.